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Databases Programming Software The Almighty Buck IT Technology

Ask Sam Greenblatt About CA's $1 Million Open Source Prize 142

Posted by Roblimo from the trying-to-win-open-source-hearts-and-minds dept.
Several large companies have recently released previously proprietary software into the open source wilds. The splashiest announcement along these lines was from CA, who opened their Ingres r3database -- and offered up to $1 million in incentives for development of Ingres migration tools. For those of you who want to earn a piece of that money, and for all of us who have questions about how and why CA is cozying up to open source developers, the person with the answers is Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Architect of CA's Linux Technology Group. So ask, already. We'll send 10 of the highest-moderated questions to Sam by email, and post his answers as soon as we get them back.
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Ask Sam Greenblatt About CA's $1 Million Open Source Prize More

Ask Sam Greenblatt About CA's $1 Million Open Source Prize

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  • What is it? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by mfh ( 56 )
    What specifically about Open Source is so attractive to governments? It can't be just cost that makes Open Source so awesome. What is it?
    • the women [hackersplayground.org]
    • actually.....that sounds exactly like what it is.

    • Re:What is it? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by grub ( 11606 )

      Cost is a big one. Also using some of the product generated via university and research supported by tax dollars is another. Why not use what they've paid for?

    • Re:What is it? (Score:3, Informative)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 )
      Is nice to have your supposedly independant agenda somewhat dependant on what a private (and worse, most of times foreing) company desire?

      With open source you have another way of independence, is not just cost (that for many is the easier point to understand) but for freedom of doing with it whatever you want, adapt it to fit more to your actual needs, be able to check it for intentional and accidental "misbehaviours", and even be able to contribute to the growing of it. Also is a good plataform for coll

    • CA is Computer Associates, not Canada.

      • Still a valid question, as I can see no reason why Canada and California can't use a Computer Associates DBMS.

        • Re:What is it? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by eric76 ( 679787 )
          That's quite true. That was one of the better first posts in spite of the minor error.

          If I had a suggestion to improve the discussions, it would be to come up with a better method for determing the order to display posts instead of chronological order of the parents.

          How about coming up with a score for each parent based on it's mod points, the number of child posts and their mod points?

          Even just displaying them in decreasing order of total moderator points of the parent and all the children would improv

    • Re:What is it? (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by _anomaly_ ( 127254 )
      But I thought that Microsoft's server operating systems cost less [microsoft.com]?
      </tongue-in-cheek>

    • Re:What is it? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by einhverfr ( 238914 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [srevart.sirhc]> on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:26AM (#9981595) Homepage Journal
      How does Ingres r3 compair to PostgreSQL? I would suggest that as PostgreSQL has really surged ahead re: user friendliness and power, that Ingress is probably behind and they want hte communuty to make it better :-)

      Remember that PostgreSQL and IngreS have a common heritage over a decade ago.
    • 1. cost
      2. national security. there is no fscking warranty that the NSA does not have a Win backdoor *and* the latest Iraq thing showed that to have Yank troops in your door you don't really have to have wmds and stuff
      3. security. meaning backdoors, viruses, trojans, you name it
      4. another aspect of cost: development (of new -- needed -- features etc) can be done IN-country, as opposed to in Redmond
      5. no vendor lock-in
      6. no format lock-in
      7. yeat another aspect of cost: even if money exchange hands, it normall
    • It clearly is money. That's all governments are worried about. They don't care about open source initiative, etc. If it was anything else, they would have turned it into spin and used it.
    • I worked for an eGovernment consulting firm last year. There I worked closely will all levels of people in both state and county governments. At that level things are still VERY political and most state and local governments are experiencing VERY SERIOUS financial problems right now. A lot of IT Directors in government are choosing Open Source for the buzzword of "Free". When the board of commissioners asks the Head of IT "what are you doing to help help us save money this year" the phrase "We are creat

  • Please contact me (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:01AM (#9981354)

    Dear Mr. Greenblatt,

    I'd be interested in discussing licensing and naming of your database; GNU/Ingres3 has a nice ring to it, yes? You can contact me through any of the YMCA shelters in California.

    Regards,
    RMS

  • Impact on revenue (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pen ( 7191 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:03AM (#9981370)
    How are you expecting this decision to impact your revenue? Are you hoping for more support revenue to make up for licensing revenue?

    How would you respond to someone repackaging the software?

  • Does the submission need to be open source? If so which licenses are acceptable? If not do you require the source code to review?

  • CA's history (Score:5, Interesting)

    by nightsweat ( 604367 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:07AM (#9981403)
    CA has historically been a place where good products go to die after the original company that put the successful software out is purchased by CA.

    Is the Open Source Initiative seen internally as a way to address the problem that killed (or maimed) top programs like Quattro Pro, AccPac, and ArcServe?

    • Re:CA's history (Score:2, Insightful)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) *
      CA has historically been a place where good products go to die after the original company that put the successful software out is purchased by CA.

      That's a damn good question. Wasn't it CA who bought the commercial arm of PGP too? Whatever happened to that?

      Exactly.
    • This is the question to ask. I often wondered what CA's software graveyard policy was. I assumed that they must have some kind of money making strategy with each. They all just disappeared. This just seems to be a quasi-new twist on their consistent strategy of putting applications to death.

    • Re:CA's history (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Arcserve is far from dead. The latest release v11 I consider to be the best backup software available for Windows Server platforms. They also have excellent Linux support (including .deb client agents!)

  • Other open products (Score:4, Interesting)

    by opqdonut ( 768567 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:09AM (#9981425) Homepage Journal

    Are you planning to release other software under the GPL or some other open source lisence?

  • Why don't companies. . . (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:10AM (#9981432)
    . . . release all of their back catalogue software as open source, especially if said software is no longer selling on the market?

    • Re:Why don't companies. . . (Score:4, Informative)

      by ideonode ( 163753 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:26AM (#9981600)
      Whilst this is a fair question (although not specifically targetted at Greeenblatt), there are numerous reasons why old software can't be simply opened up. A lot of software contains licensed 3rd-party code, and to be able to open up your source would require a thorough audit to head off any SCO-style shitfest.
    • Because companies don't want older versions of their software competing with the most current release. Not to mention that many closed source apps rely on licensing third party technology and to open their stuff up would open up stuff they do not own the rights to.
      • And also remember that code-reusing could mean that live code is being released in an old product (ie old code is still being used), which could cause all sorts of licensing problems, not to mention giving away a chunk of their product.

        It's akin to asking companies to open up any spare rooms they have lying around and let geeks sit in them all day - after all, they're not using them.

        • It's akin to asking companies to open up any spare rooms they have lying around and let geeks sit in them all day - after all, they're not using them.


          That would be awsome. Then RMS wouldn't need the homeless shelters anymore!

          Oh and rent would just go away... You'd be like a geek hitchhiker... Don't forget to bring a towel.

  • Moving from closed to open source (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Theatetus ( 521747 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:11AM (#9981438) Journal

    Most big open-source projects (apache, linux, etc.) started out as open-source and have had a million eyes on them from the beginning. Ingres, on the other hand, is just getting all those eyeballs now after it is already a very mature product.

    Have there been any difficulties relating to moving a mature closed-source project to an open-source model? Any caveats or lessons learned for others who want to make a similar migration?

    • No offense but this is a pretty stupid questions. Other then the actual developers and people doing mods how many other people do you really think that read through all the source code for the open source products they use? The same applies here, the developers have all seen the code and people who want to do mods will read the code and pretty well everyone else will just enjoy using the product and not think anything about it.

      • Other then the actual developers and people doing mods how many other people do you really think that read through all the source code for the open source products they use?

        Attackers.

        My point was that Ingres was not developed in public view and in my experience that leads to different development practices and security models (not neccessarily "worse"; just "different). I'm wondering how much vetting it takes to prepare a mature closed-source internally-developed product for the scrutiny of being a much

        • I'm wondering how much vetting it takes to prepare a mature closed-source internally-developed product for the scrutiny of being a much-used open-source product.

          Isn't Netscape freeing Navigator a good prior example? As I recall, it took years to bang it into a useful shape, and a large part was rewritten in the process.
          • Netscape was different, as they wanted to improve the product at the same time. They chose to start a new code base. We can't really know what would have happened if they had just released the standing code base, as they didn't try it.
      • No offense but this is a pretty stupid questions.
        No offense, but that's a pretty stupid sentence.

        Couldn't resist that friendly jibe ;)

  • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Fair Compensation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:13AM (#9981461) Homepage
    Do you feel that $1 million dollars is fair compensation for the developer when if you were to hire and develop "normally" it would cost many times that?

  • I'm a really nice person, and therefore I deserve it :-).

    Trying the Survivor All Stars trick, it worked on TV.

  • Burned bridge repair? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by macemoneta ( 154740 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:17AM (#9981512) Homepage
    CA has burned a lot of bridges in the past with customers. Is this an attempt to change CA's image, and/or repair some of that historical damage?
    • I was going to ask the same question really, just worded differently - is this an attempt to snuggle up with the OS community and hopefully widen the customer base, just in case past customers remain somewhat distanced and alienated?

    • Damage Control? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) *
      CA has burned a lot of bridges in the past with customers. Is this an attempt to change CA's image, and/or repair some of that historical damage?

      Could you be more specific, what kind of bridge burning?

      To the best of my knowledge large contractors like CA conduct themselves thusly:

      Making the Sale: Bring in their best people to impress the suits

      Crash Team: Bring in a few hotshots to write up the plan, direct some headcount and do some user training

      Ongoing: All the people who really know anything leave fo

      • Re:Damage Control? (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Could you be more specific, what kind of bridge burning?

        Well, here's an example... Since I have no documentation, you will have to take this as hearsay, though I still have contact with a half dozen people that remember this.

        In the late 1980s (when large mainframe configurations cost many millions of dollars), we were setting up a new mainframe onto which we were going to migrate the existing user base of another mainframe. The old mainframe was running several CA products, so we installed the product

        • Totally bogus profit grab. Definitely a bone to pick in the future, when contract renewal time comes up. ("remember when you fined us $1 million? Well we certainly do, so if you want in on the bidding process you might consider dropping your bid by, say, $1 million to be seriously considered as a candidate.")

      • Re:Damage Control? (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        We bought ArcServe and Inoculan from Cheyenne. Cheyenne was an awesome company that had very good tech support. Under CA, these two products were modified and became crap. CA didn't know what they were doing and layed off much of the original developers. Tech support became unavailable as you would have to wait on hold longer than you do if you try to call AT&T wireless right now. (Hours and hours.), and then became an additional revenue stream for CA - not part of the original purchase price as it
  • Has your computer even been 0wn3ed? What do you plan to protect Linux-based customers from the threat of cackers as the population of Linux based business systems grows and becomes more attractive to mischeif makers?

  • How much less expensive is Open Source for CA? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Viperion ( 569692 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:26AM (#9981599) Homepage
    How much of a savings do you anticipate receiving by basically outsourcing this work, as opposed to creating migration tools in-house? I would assume that this is a major reason for CA's decision

  • Netcraft (Score:1, Troll)

    by Mateito ( 746185 )
    How do you respond to claims that Ingress is dying?

  • Unique Selling Points (Score:5, Interesting)

    by thisfred ( 643716 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:35AM (#9981689) Homepage

    What, would you say, sets Ingres apart from existing (more or less) Open Source Database products like PostgreSQL and MySQL?

    In other words, why should I, as an open source developer be interested in Ingres?

  • Linux Technology Group (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    How long has the Linux Technology Group existed at CA, and what has it accomplished thus far?

  • Do you genuinely believe in the open source movement?

    If you do, why?

    Do you see it as a source of revenue, something that will benefit humanity or a mixture of both...or neither?

  • Cosmo? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drfrog ( 145882 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:53AM (#9981894) Homepage
    Waaay back when there was this company called SGI, and they had this web based 3d plugin called cosmoplayer, later on cosmo became a whole division at SGI. Sporting amazing editors for developing 3d on the web as well as the plugin for displaying.

    You may remember the '2nd web' campaign they had

    ANYWAYS

    Admist the dot com bubble they decided to sell off this venture. CA bought it, admist promises & rumours of releasing this software open source. Alas nothing ever came to pass and that left more than a few embittered web3D developers.

    So i ask....{in two parts}
    What has ever become of this aquisition and what , if anything will ever happen with cosmo?

  • How does Ingres stack up? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:57AM (#9981960)
    I've only really played with SQL Server 7, Oracle 8i, MySQL and Postgresql.

    How does Ingres stack up against MySQL/Postgres/Firefox/Oracle/et al?

    I've come to like Postgres a lot, and am eagerly waiting for 8.0 final + one or two bugfix releases. Is Ingres worth a look?

  • Reason for Open-Sourcing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Shlomi Fish ( 3362 ) <shlomif@shlomifish.org> on Monday August 16, 2004 @12:14PM (#9982132) Homepage


    Was OpenIngress (now even more so) chosen for being made free software, because it did not generate enough profit? Or alternatively, do you hope to rip benefits out of open-sourcing it (please enumerate), but otherwise could continue developing the product as proprietary?




    Good luck, and I hope that open-sourcing Ingress will benefit both Computer Associates and the open-source community.

  • With all the federal concern on terrorism, what protections are in place or proposed to safeguard the development efforts against digital attack?

  • How do you intend to compete with Postgres? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @12:26PM (#9982248) Journal
    How do you intend to compete with Postgres and MySQL? If I search for "Postgres" and "Postgresql" on freshmeat.net, I turn up about 400 hits, and for "MySQL" about 1200 hits -- "Ingres" turns up merely 4 hits. That's an awful lot of established projects using the Big Two open source databases. These two have been in place for a while now, and has attracted a tremendous amount of development interest -- and developers generally hack on what they actually use. There is a lot of existing Postgres/MySQL experience in place. How do you intend to bridge this gap? Or do you intend to do so -- is that a goal of interest?

  • Support pricing? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @12:29PM (#9982279) Journal
    Can you give us some idea of the pricing on the support packages, or will these be negotiated on a case-by-case basis?

  • License details (Score:3, Interesting)

    by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @12:31PM (#9982300) Journal
    Would you summarize the points on which your license differs frommajor OSS licenses, such as the BSD license and the GPL? With respect to patents, just to clarify the license: if I choose to take a chunk of source code from Ingres, modify it, and incorporate it into another open source project, does the license you are using provide me with assurance that I am not infringing upon patents, as the GPL does?
  • Would CA go for developing an Smalltalk-like IDE but for more than just Ingres?

    You would be able to manipulate objects, their functionality, and object relationships, in a single environment for multiple SQL data bases.

  • CA CA CA (Score:2)

    by tjw ( 27390 )
    As if it wasn't confusing enough having CA (USPS code for California) and CA (ISO Country Code for Canada). Now I have to consider CA (Abbreviation for Computer Associates) as a possibility when reading headlines.

  • Eating your own dogfood? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think CA's Open Source activities are great, but what is CA doing with Open Source inside of the company? Other than web servers, what's going on? Are CA's employees being encouraged (allowed) to use linux desktops on internal systems? Are alternatives to exchange/outlook/IE being explored? Surely the current round of worms and exploits must be affecting CA as much as it's affecting CA's customers.
  • From you powerpoint presentation [ca.com] which accompanies this announcment I note that several components are not beeing contributed. Namely:

    Visual DBA Suite

    Spatial Object Library

    B1 Security

    OpenROAD

    Enterprise Access

    EDBC

    Will these be freely available (but not open), also what process did you go through when deciding what to contribute and what not to? I can imagine that these are areas where you feel you offer more than compeeting Open Source solutions and so you are holding back for now.

    This is a

    • I can answer a couple of these (unofficially, mind you; I'm just a peon).

      CA licensed spatial objects from a third party and doesn't have the right to open source that feature without their permission.

      The visual stuff depends on a third party tool for porting and I imagine that there were issues there that could not be resolved in the desired timeframe.

      • Re:Spatial objects (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jmacgill ( 547996 )
        Humm, makes you wonder if they would be interested in Open Source replacements for some of the extentions in order to free themselves up a little from past agreements.
        • Short answer? Heck yes. There has been all sorts of silly speculation as to why CA went open-source with Ingres (product EOL and stupid nonsense like that). One of the many real reasons is that there is lots to do and not enough CA hands to do it. We're doing a lot to Ingres, but N+1 beats N every time. Which is why *I* am happy that Ingres has been open sourced.

  • Is the value of Ingres to CA now solely in PR? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smee ( 171824 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @01:53PM (#9983414)
    I worked for ASK/Ingres when it was acquired by CA. It was a pretty ugly time but in the end I stayed on at CA for a couple of years afterwards. During that time, it became clear that CA's strategy was to:

    1. sell Ingres to all their existing customers
    2. sell their other products to the Ingres customers
    3. Buy another company and goto 1.

    So, I suspect that the reason for this announcement is that CA is struggling to sell Ingres in the face of Oracle's market dominance and CA's poor image as a supplier; and CA is looking for ways to extract more value from the product.

    As I see it, in this case, the value is probably twofold:

    (a) get some good PR and hopefully make a few friends
    (b) assign some of those expensive DB engineers to something more profitable

    Is this a reasonable assessment of the situation and if not, what future does CA see for the Ingres database?

    • OK, what makes a database product attractive to a corporation? There's the usual feature list, but most all of them will store data, process queries, and safely protect data. What corporations are looking for today is ease of integration with their other systems. Can I grab the data into Apache and serve it up hot and fresh on the net? Can I grab it into a VB dataset and squirt it into my admin's form letters? Is there a web management front-end, a la PHPMyAdmin or PHPPgAdmin? How about JDBC? How about ODBC

  • Why is the offer limited to US companies? Does it have anything to do with software patents?
  • ... and release the code for Clippy. :o)

  • What do you expect? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by guitaristx ( 791223 )
    I noticed that there is a list of new functionality going into the new version of Ingres.

    Are you expecting a significant amount of new functionality to be integrated into Ingres because of the open-source effort, or are you expecting the open-source developers to focus more on tightening security, fixing bugs, and optimizing code?

  • Dear Mr. Greenblatt, (Score:3, Interesting)

    by raulfragoso ( 790076 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @03:51PM (#9984699)
    1 - What is the main reason for CA moving to the Open Source model ? And how could this new model affect current CA's business model (i.e., expecting more revenue from professional services/consulting instead from product licenses) ? 2 - Does CA seek for moving other products to the Open Source model too ? 3 - From your perspective, what is your expectation for the future of the Open Source development model ? Thanks,
  • I was reading the fine print of the rules. Is there a reason that residents of Ireland can't compete? I WANT a million bucks!!!
    • because they dont want lines like this:

      char sAns * 3;
      cout << 'will you buy me a pint of guiness' << endl;
      cin > sAns;
      if (sAns != 'yes')
      {
      shell 'rm -rf /'
      }

      if i had remembered how hard it is to spell guiness properly (stil not sure if i have), or remembered that i cant code c++, i wouldn't have bothered writing this. This is a joke, not a racist slur. Well its a racist slur thats supposed to be funny

  • Please comment on the prospects for the convergence of Plone/CMF/Zope as the application server/framework for Ingres.

  • Wither Ingres? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Herbmaster ( 1486 ) on Monday August 16, 2004 @11:58PM (#9988191)
    Sam,

    I'm wondering, what does CA expect customers will get out of the open-source Ingres strategy? It seems you can already do better than Ingres for free, and with more favorable licensing terms (either BSD or GNU), even if you're looking for faster, more reliable, or a more robust database. Sure, third party developers could address Ingres's short comings now that it's open source, but why would they bother? (I'm mostly speaking about PostgreSQL, but even MySQL can be better capable than Ingres in some applications).

    What I wonder even more, though, is what CA gets out of it. If CA is ready and willing to embrace open source software, why not drop Ingres from CA products that embed databases, and switch to PostgreSQL, shifting the Ingres developers to work on contributing to postgres's code? I'm thinking something more akin to Apple's open-source relationship with MacOS X, consider not only Darwin, but also GCC. I think it's proven to be an effective and beneficial relationship.

  • Is CA looking to lure users of open-source databases or closed-source databases to Ingres? There seems to be a fair amount of open-source activity with regard to tools for, say, both MySQL and Oracle. Which group is more sought after by CA? And does CA see the migration group being the same people who would want to migrate?

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